well said

Because it shows they can't put forth an ounce of effort to appear literate, in a setting where it's very advantageous not to look like an idiot.

One of my particular pet peeves is when the support reps at my job can't be bothered to make their call notes clear, when the very purpose of them is for people to be able to refer to later as needed. Who's going to want to read this, for example?

...looks like she put a comma in there by accident, that's atypical for her. Maybe her hand slipped.

If I had to read that, I'd take the ten seconds to copy it to a blank doc and use LibreOffice's sentence case feature, but there's just one big, uh, "sentence." Still worth it, though, because the ALL CAPS is actually painful.



Now it's like a penniless man's Molly Bloom's soliloquy.

View it as information that you can use to optimize your sequences; do you get annoyed at fish for playing bad? If not, exploit the droolers!

Granted it's pretty annoying when you have to work with them and it's all in capitals

For the record, the ancient system we had in place a decade ago required the login and most of the navigation commands to be in caps, so by default most of the notes wound up in caps as well. Apparently old habits die hard...you'd think that she might notice that she's the ONLY ONE still using all caps at this point.

it's working, so why adapt?

As we get older and more youngsters enter the work force this will probably be way more common and accepted. And yeah, it's terrible. I mean I'm only 33 and I think anyone who writes likes this is a dumb mother****er. I can't imagine what 50 year olds think.

In the future, you will be made fun of for composing an email with vowels and punctuation. The kids will be like "Hey where's your top hat? Where's your monocle, you old fancy dinosaur?"

fyp

you guyz r so wrong about insisting on capitalization ("but okay! special exemption for IMs cause they're not !WRITING!") and worrying about cartoonish extremes it's not even funny

first of all: **** your condescension (e.g. "you kids will grow out of it and learn to capitalize properly just like me")

secondly: look around; use your senses; stop filtering so much; stop weighing the world of data out there so prejudicially: now more than ever, we exist in an environment where the spectrum of textual communication and expression has a ton of variety and gradations, and coming at this reality with your Strunk & White booklet (which you should burn, like now) is beyond laughable

therefore: be less upset about trivialities of usage, and focus more open-mindedly on what works and how it works in newly established modes of discourse in all the strange formats that now abound: emailing, blogging, twittering, foruming, facebooking, texting, micro-blogging, tumblering, smartphoning, DragonNaturallySpeaking, and soon, direct brain-to-machine interfacing

You misspelled tumblring. *uplifts nose* Hmmph.

dammit

and i forgot to mention ebonics

wanted to work that in there somehow, but lost the thread

I think you stumbled into the wrong thread, you were looking for bbv4l.

omg comma splice

nblg

When you have two short clauses with the same subject (in this case "you") it's ok to do that. A semicolon there wouldn't work as well and would change the meaning. It would have made the second clause not be an object of "I think".

Since you've made clear you aren't worried about capitalization and punctuation in the new communication mediums, grammar should be the least of your worries.

I definitely wasn't parsing the second clause as an object of "I think," and have to strain to do it now, even if technically it's "legal." Not really seeing it.

It's interesting, because what you're talking about seems to work for me in other examples, like:

"I think you were lost, you were confused maybe, you were drunk, you were you."


Also, it's not "worried about punctuation and grammar" versus "carefree." It's "hidebound" versus "open."

Hidebound implies that the change would be good. I admit I'm not convinced that giving up standard writing in email and texting is a good thing. It leads to lazy writing all the time. I've raised teenagers who forget how to write.

As I alluded to earlier, in the flow of dialog fragments are perfectly fine, and leaving out all sentence rules in very short responses works for me. But abandoning the rules entirely doesn't.

See, I get this argument, but I think it's ultimately wrong-headed. In my magical utopia, this is what happens: the kid learns everything. He gets a thorough liberal education, with all the traditional, formalized, standardized phases of Reading and Writing, K through college-ish. He absorbs whatever's happening linguistically in contemporary mass culture. He plays along and innovates verbally or textually with his peers. He is then free to employ a maximized range of styles and modes and so forth, constantly trying stuff and seeing what works where and switching registers situationally.

Now, outside my magical utopia, events may not transpire thus. But I don't think you fix it by castigating or bemoaning or whatever-ing newly established formats of linguistic communication. For one thing, it's a hopeless uphill endeavor. For another, it's a hellishly inefficient way to get kids to practice conventional forms of writing. Are they really going to text and email their way towards elegant five-paragraph essays and persuasive argumentation and well-paid ad copy and crystalline technical writing? You learn that stuff the hard way, by practicing it. And if you're depending on reformed texting and emailing habits to maintain a kid's capacity to write in standard English, there's a deeper issue at play there, and one needs to look at why more normal venues of writing practice aren't regularly presenting themselves to the child.

Plus, if any semblance of a decent foundation is there, you'd be surprised how quickly what you're calling laziness and forgetfulness will give way to increasing competence and proficiency once our hypothetical kid has a strong and meaningful reason to embark on serious writing projects.

Your points are well stated. I have old man opinions and it would pain me greatly to send a text filled with run-on, uncapitalized, unpunctuated sentences.

Argument in the office regarding the use of penultimate.

As I understand it 'this was John Grisham's penultimate novel' indicates it was his second to last novel before he died (or stopped writing). It is not referencing his second last (read latest) novel.

With this is mind, is the word penultimate allowed in this sentence?

'Team A and Team B have a long head-to-head history. In their penultimate meeting Team A won 2:0.'

As we know, ultimate means last. Finito. Therefore, since the head-to-head contests are ongoing, how can penultimate be used?

source?

It's mentioned lots of places (search for comma splice). But just think about it logically. What works and what doesn't and what is the intent of the "rules"? Sometimes a semicolon is the best choice to separate clauses. Sometimes it isn't.

My second sentence in the above paragraph begins with a conjunction too, and it's a good sentence. Some "sources" will tell you not to do that, but it's a bad rule that is mostly ignored by writers.

It doesn't work. I have no intentions of ever reading that wall of text. Most people's eyes are going to bleed when doing so. It makes you look like an absolute ****.

Official work emails should NEVER be written informally, or with any of that ****ing spasticated text format. Its gd 2 rite proper. pffffff..when I see **** like that I think of the good old days of despotism and unnatural selection.

Sorry, I disagree.

That comma is horrible and it made me lose my hard on.

In retrospect the sentence wasn't the best, but the point was correct. Comma splices are definitely not absolute and when choosing to separate clauses with a semicolon or comma, or even a hyphen, use what works. Sometimes two sentences separated by a period is the worst choice even though the grammar would be flawless.